"Sex in the City--at 70??"

Bea trudges the short distance from the kitchen to the den and stops. When she turns to me, her eyes look glassy, and it has nothing to do with her cataracts. “I was married. A long time ago, before you were even an embryo, kid. He died during the war, and I died right along with him. Are you happy now, Miss Nosy?”



I stare at the dips and valleys on her face and try to imagine its topography before gravity took over. Clear blue eyes and strong cheekbones wink back at me, and with it, the woman who gave her heart to someone, devoid of thick, yellow toenails. It occurs to me that Ms. Krantz looks like a mound of flabby flesh because this is the way she sees herself. “I’m sorry,” I finally say.


“Forget sorry. It’s a waste of time, kid. You want to be somebody’s charity case? Go help that mother of yours. Be happy that she’s found someone. It sure the hell ain’t easy,” she says before putting a hand to her thick middle. “Goofy, come on. Enough with that damn video game!”


I think of the psychological picture Mr. Johnson brought into class last week. It was a black and white drawing of an old woman and young woman in one. He’d been trying to teach us about perspective and used the drawing as an example. From one angle, the woman was young and beautiful, and from another she became frighteningly old and haggard. This is what pops into my head when Ms. Krantz tells me to be kind to my mother: Sam Fluchter is the young woman who wants romance as much as the sagging, velour-housedress-wearing Ms. Krantz.


“Maybe you’ll meet someone,” I say. She blows out air—a whoopee cushion crushed by a terrible weight. “It can still happen.”


“Yeah, and my legs can double as the Rockettes’.” She raises her bushy eyebrows at me and yanks up her housedress to the knees. Clusters of purple and blue veins—some flat but many more raised—stare back at me. It is a queasy kind of sight. “Hey fellas, come and take a look at me!” She laughs but it is the forced kind that leaves me wanting to hug her, just like Meeka did.


When she tries to straighten her curved back I am certain she can smell my pity. “Look, I don’t want any stupid romance, anyway. Now, get out of my hair, kid!”


I grab the portable phone in our kitchen and dial Deidra’s number, again. Ms. Krantz can talk until she’s blue in the face about how she doesn’t want any love in her life, but those ridiculously fat romance novels she races through tell me a different story. Somewhere out there is a male version of Ms. Krantz. Someone equally plagued with canned tuna breath and saggy skin. Everyone wants a heart to hold them—not just the beautiful people—but the Bea Krantzs out there too—even me. And, I suppose, my mother, too.